1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer software and, in particular, to a system and method for quantizing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the internet to deliver marketing messages to potential customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual advertisements on search engine results pages, banner advertisements, rich media (e.g., video) advertisements, social network advertisements, interstitial advertisements, online classified advertisements, e-mail marketing, and many others.
One important aspect of an online advertisement is the online “conversion” of the online advertisement, which refers generally to a customer completing an online transaction with an online merchant in response to viewing the online advertisement. Typically, when a customer views an online advertisement, the customer's activity across one or more web pages is tracked to determine whether a particular online transaction is actually completed by the customer. One example of a tracking technique is referred to as pixel-based tracking, where a 1×1 pixel image—often referred to as a “web beacon”—is linked to an online advertisement and included in each web page of, for example, an online shopping cart. The 1×1 pixel image reports information back to a manager of the online advertisement such that the manager is able to determine whether the customer has reached an order confirmation page, indicating that the online advertisement was successful by resulting in a conversion.
Although most merchants provide their customers the ability to shop online, there exists a large number of merchants that have one or more brick-and-mortar locations, referred to herein as “offline” merchants. Though offline merchants typically do not provide an online shopping cart to their customers, the offline merchants may nonetheless be interested in online advertising that causes customers to visit their brick-and-mortar locations in an attempt to increase sales. Unfortunately, as with offline advertising (e.g., advertising in magazines, TV, radio, etc.), it is difficult for offline merchants to measure the performance of their online advertising campaigns.
One attempt to measure performance of an advertising campaign involves polling customers and asking them to share the motivation for the purchase they are making. For example, if a customer shops at a merchant location during a sale, then the merchant may ask the customer, “Where did you hear about our sale?” Unfortunately, some customers are lazy and do not wish to share such information with the merchant or may provide inaccurate information. Determining the effectiveness of an online portion of ad campaign is further complicated when the same advertisements are presented to potential customers through other channels that are not online.
As the foregoing illustrates, there is a need in the art for an improved technique for quantizing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.